Peanut Butter and Jelly

A few years ago (I real­ly have no idea how many, three? four? five maybe?), I aban­doned the prac­tice of eat­ing lunch out. I used to eat out five days a week, but it got to the point that I could no longer afford to do so.

I start­ed “brown­bag­ging” it. A cool­er, sev­er­al cans of caf­feine free Coca-Cola, and two peanut but­ter and jel­ly sand­wich­es. The first jel­ly was what I found in the fridge, Welch’s Grape Jel­ly. Then a few jars of Smuckers.

Over time, when Deb­by and I did any trav­el­ing, I start­ed buy­ing jars of jam at var­i­ous gift shops, winer­ies and oth­er retail stores that we stopped in. As the cans of Coca-Cola decreased with bot­tles of water replac­ing them, I also began to learn what I want­ed in a jam.

I much pre­fer pre­serves to jel­ly; I like to have some pieces of fruit in the jam. I learned that if the sug­ars were over ten grams in a table­spoon, it would be too sweet (today there is only water in the cool­er, no Coca-Cola.…not even in the house!). Also, I avoid any jam that lists corn syrup or any thing like it in the ingre­di­ants. I also pre­fer that the ingre­di­ant list begins with the appro­pri­ate fruit and the few­er ingre­di­ants the better.

Two week­ends ago, Deb­by had a week­end with her daugh­ter in St. Louis. One of the places they went to was the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den. While there, Deb­by, being the lov­ing, thought­ful per­son she alway is, bought a jar of jam for me. She checked the label. No corn syrup and 2 grams of sug­ar per serving.

It did not take long for me to check the nutri­tion label when Deb­by gave me the pre­serves. “Two grams of sugar…gee, that might not be sweet enough,” I thought to myself. But I had just recent­ly fin­ished off a jar of jam that had only five grams of sug­ar and it was excel­lent. So I looked for­ward to try­ing my new preserves.

Just a cou­ple of days lat­er, I fin­ished the jar I was using and opened my new pre­serves. I made the sec­ond sand­wich with the new stuff, the first sand­wich with the last of the pre­vi­ous jar. Then I licked the knife.

It tast­ed very sweet.

When I ate the sand­wich­es, I knew imme­di­ate­ly when I bit into the one with the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den Black­ber­ry Pre­serves. It was sweet. Very sweet. Too sweet.

There is no way in heck that those pre­serves have only two grams of sug­ar per serv­ing. That jar is so sweet, I can’t even believe that the two is a mis­print for twelve. Twen­ty one maybe. It is not edible.

I will fur­ther com­ment that the pre­serves have a tex­ture more akin to jel­ly than to pre­serves. There is lit­tle if any pieces of fruit. It is hard for me to judge due to the over­whelm­ing sweet­ness, but the black­ber­ry fla­vor that I think I maybe can detect is good.

I won­der if Deb­by can get her mon­ey back?

4 thoughts on “Peanut Butter and Jelly”

  1. Are black­ber­ries nat­u­ral­ly sweet berries? The “no sug­ar added” thing on the front stands out too. Per­haps it and the “2 g” are mis­print­ed or, per­haps, cre­ative marketing.

  2. I do not believe that black­ber­ries are as sweet as some oth­er berries (espe­cial­ly straw­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries and rasp­ber­ries). In this case no sug­ar added sim­ply means it is sweet­ened with some­thing else, white grape juice con­cen­trate. Grapes can be very sweet. I have to believe that the 2 grams of sug­ar is a misprint.

  3. The 2 was­n’t a misprint.

    The G stands for gallons.

    That’s two gal­lons of sug­ar syrup, boiled down to make this jar of preserves.

    ;o)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.